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[Robsoie]

are you sure no alien spotted any of your troop on the turn the "21+ range" alien opened fire ?

Because i remember during their turns aliens moving in sight range, and if your own soldiers didn't do a "reaction fire" the alien could simply move back into darkness, they did that a lot in the original game .
And if an alien spotted you this way, all the other aliens were then be able to "blind fire" to the spotted units location.

After that bad luck on your side + alien lucky accuracy may do the rest, and bad luck happens a lot, at least to me

[Jacob/Lee]

Smoke is your friend. Throw up smoke clouds in open areas so you can move your soldiers to actual cover, preferably in a closer-range area where you have a chance at reacting. If you suspect there's an alien camping a particular spot, reduce it to dust with grenades and rockets. Flying armor is not a reason to forego early-game defensive maneuvers, because a heavy plasma shot can and will kill a soldier in one hit.

Also, in my experience, aliens have a tendency to spend most of their TUs firing when they spot a soldier. If somebody is shot from the darkness and you don't want to or can't reach them, start firing back with explosive weapons and throw grenades. There's a good chance you'll kill it or level any cover it moved behind.

[EnigmaticHat]

I always found myself getting brutalized even on easiest difficulty.  I learned a few tricks, namely to throw smoke bombs, and to deploy troops around the 'ranger's ramp in a slightly spread pattern, facing all directions.  If the ranger parks near a map edge, as it's often wont to do, then reposition those soldiers into better firing arcs.  After 10-15 turns, most things die to reaction fire from my troops, and at 20 I'm usually sitting by the UFO's door waiting for them to come out.

The problem I always have, is that aliens seem to have 1 more tile of sight than soldiers.  I've lost SO MANY soldiers, even with full TU and high reaction, because an alien was somehow invisible and taking pot shots that one-shot a guy in flying armor from the front.  I quit playing, because I don't know how you're supposed to defend against something that's invisible and instantly fatal.

There are a lot of little line of sight quirks based on the fact that aliens are not always the same size as your soldiers.

As a general rule your troops are AWFUL at reaction fire.  Also if both sides see each other at the same time the defender doesn't get reaction fire until the attacker takes another action, which is usually shooting the defender.  The idea of "defense" is to have a line of semi-expendable spotters (how expendable depends on how cruel you are) and snipers in back.  The AI, at least in Open XCom, tends to reserve TUs for defense, which means that they won't move that far in each turn.  Move your spotters forward half their TUs each turn, then if they don't spot an alien retreat them back.  Offense is the same thing but instead of retreating you either reserve your TUs for reaction fire, or find concealment.

[Zazmio]

In this game, you just kinda have to accept that you lose soldiers you care about to crazy stuff.  It's part of the game.

Just the other day, I had a few rookies standing around by a ufo door, getting ready to storm the ufo.  During the alien's turn, a floater pops out and, ignoring all the rookies nearby, one shots my awesome commander from quite a ways away, then pops back into the ufo, without a single reaction shot being fired.  X-Com is great.

[Girlinhat]

In this game, you just kinda have to accept that you lose soldiers you care about to crazy stuff.  It's part of the game.

Just the other day, I had a few rookies standing around by a ufo door, getting ready to storm the ufo.  During the alien's turn, a floater pops out and, ignoring all the rookies nearby, one shots my awesome commander from quite a ways away, then pops back into the ufo, without a single reaction shot being fired.  X-Com is great.

That's really the one thing I can't handle.  I can deal with shit like Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress types of difficulty because it punishes you - you explicitly have to do something wrong, but as soon as you make a mistake it's going to rail you so hard you'll wish you hadn't played.  But there's the thing.  You actually have to do something wrong before the game will kill you.

Open X-Com isn't so.  You can do everything perfectly, and still get ruined.  That's one thing that I just can't understand truly enjoying, because it presents an arbitrary no-win situation.  Up to a certain point, it makes sense that 'the enemy is going to hurt you' but when I've got like 6 guys facing one direction, all of them mid-level and in flight suits, with full TU on each, I can still have an enemy appear to fire from +1 tile away, one-shot any of them, and never be visible to me, well, I really don't know how to handle that because there is literally no way to handle that.

Punishing gameplay is fine, and makes you get better, but arbitrarily lethal gameplay just forces you to accept that you're not going to play very well.

[Gunner-Chan]

If that's all too much you could always try Xenonauts. It felt a lot like a more fair but classic oriented X-Com to me and owlga.

[Sean Mirrsen]

In this game, you just kinda have to accept that you lose soldiers you care about to crazy stuff.  It's part of the game.

Just the other day, I had a few rookies standing around by a ufo door, getting ready to storm the ufo.  During the alien's turn, a floater pops out and, ignoring all the rookies nearby, one shots my awesome commander from quite a ways away, then pops back into the ufo, without a single reaction shot being fired.  X-Com is great.

That's really the one thing I can't handle.  I can deal with shit like Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress types of difficulty because it punishes you - you explicitly have to do something wrong, but as soon as you make a mistake it's going to rail you so hard you'll wish you hadn't played.  But there's the thing.  You actually have to do something wrong before the game will kill you.

Open X-Com isn't so.  You can do everything perfectly, and still get ruined.  That's one thing that I just can't understand truly enjoying, because it presents an arbitrary no-win situation.  Up to a certain point, it makes sense that 'the enemy is going to hurt you' but when I've got like 6 guys facing one direction, all of them mid-level and in flight suits, with full TU on each, I can still have an enemy appear to fire from +1 tile away, one-shot any of them, and never be visible to me, well, I really don't know how to handle that because there is literally no way to handle that.

Punishing gameplay is fine, and makes you get better, but arbitrarily lethal gameplay just forces you to accept that you're not going to play very well.

X-Com is kind of unpredictable. The problem you experience is that there is no one best way to handle every situation. That "doing everything perfectly" thing you mention is functionally impossible until some very late stage in the game. There is a best way to handle a given situation, but you don't know what it is in advance, and the strategy you've come to rely on may always suddenly fail. That chance that no matter what you do, something might go horribly wrong anyway, is one of the main draws of Old-Com.

Also, you are able to sneak up on a group of technologically advanced aliens and snipe off their commander before they get a chance to react. Doesn't it make sense for them to occasionally be able to do the same?

[Virtz]

OpenXcom has oe of my favourite Xcom mods availble.
I mean the Piratez mod i suggest everyone should try.

Could've been good... had the author been able to stop thinking with the wrong head while making it.

[Sonlirain]

OpenXcom has oe of my favourite Xcom mods availble.
I mean the Piratez mod i suggest everyone should try.

Could've been good... had the author been able to stop thinking with the wrong head while making it.

Odd i didn't find it that erotic if that's what you mean.

[Sharp]

That's really the one thing I can't handle.  I can deal with shit like Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress types of difficulty because it punishes you - you explicitly have to do something wrong, but as soon as you make a mistake it's going to rail you so hard you'll wish you hadn't played.  But there's the thing.  You actually have to do something wrong before the game will kill you.

Open X-Com isn't so.  You can do everything perfectly, and still get ruined.  That's one thing that I just can't understand truly enjoying, because it presents an arbitrary no-win situation.  Up to a certain point, it makes sense that 'the enemy is going to hurt you' but when I've got like 6 guys facing one direction, all of them mid-level and in flight suits, with full TU on each, I can still have an enemy appear to fire from +1 tile away, one-shot any of them, and never be visible to me, well, I really don't know how to handle that because there is literally no way to handle that.

Punishing gameplay is fine, and makes you get better, but arbitrarily lethal gameplay just forces you to accept that you're not going to play very well.

XCOM like most games suffer from having to know the system before you can beat it easily.

In night-time aliens have longer vision then you so you can indeed have the 1-tile out of sight alien snipe your troops and then run back, to handle that you make sure your troops are in cover and prodigious use of flares to try and minimise areas where aliens can hide away.

To be honest once you have flying suits your soldiers are much stronger then the aliens, only sectopods and cyberdiscs can take more damage, with blaster bombs and heavy plasma flying about then you are going to lose some people but as long as you have enough resources to build power armour and flying suits and enough meat to fill em then victory will be yours.

[Virtz]

OpenXcom has oe of my favourite Xcom mods availble.
I mean the Piratez mod i suggest everyone should try.

Could've been good... had the author been able to stop thinking with the wrong head while making it.

Odd i didn't find it that erotic if that's what you mean.

What about the pinup pictures for menu backgrounds? The manufacturing screen in particular. Or the fact that your team consists strictly of barely-dressed women?
I dunno, maybe this is supposed to be satire rather than something the author found appealing, but I kinda doubt that.

[Sonlirain]

OpenXcom has oe of my favourite Xcom mods availble.
I mean the Piratez mod i suggest everyone should try.

Could've been good... had the author been able to stop thinking with the wrong head while making it.

Odd i didn't find it that erotic if that's what you mean.

What about the pinup pictures for menu backgrounds? The manufacturing screen in particular. Or the fact that your team consists strictly of barely-dressed women?
I dunno, maybe this is supposed to be satire rather than something the author found appealing, but I kinda doubt that.

Well the background is mostly women because the mutants are apparently exclusively female (i guess the mutation only hits females) similar to the psi mutants from USO Aftershock... and it only makes sense the researchers and technicians will be female as well. Also if you don't want them running around naked you can buy clothes/armor and equip them from the very beginning to not see those yelow skinned bellies.

Also the entire mod is not really that serious so i wouldn't be too suprised if the backgrounds were being ironic as i didn't see any other forms of sexualization beyond unarmored character sprites (and maybe eather armor but what do you expect) and said backgrounds.
Most research text however reads more like banter of warhammer 40k orks than a bunch of sexy ladies.

[Virtz]

OpenXcom has oe of my favourite Xcom mods availble.
I mean the Piratez mod i suggest everyone should try.

Could've been good... had the author been able to stop thinking with the wrong head while making it.

Odd i didn't find it that erotic if that's what you mean.

What about the pinup pictures for menu backgrounds? The manufacturing screen in particular. Or the fact that your team consists strictly of barely-dressed women?
I dunno, maybe this is supposed to be satire rather than something the author found appealing, but I kinda doubt that.

Well the background is mostly women because the mutants are apparently exclusively female (i guess the mutation only hits females) similar to the psi mutants from USO Aftershock... and it only makes sense the researchers and technicians will be female as well. Also if you don't want them running around naked you can buy clothes/armor and equip them from the very beginning to not see those yelow skinned bellies.

Also the entire mod is not really that serious so i wouldn't be too suprised if the backgrounds were being ironic as i didn't see any other forms of sexualization beyond unarmored character sprites (and maybe eather armor but what do you expect) and said backgrounds.
Most research text however reads more like banter of warhammer 40k orks than a bunch of sexy ladies.

It's not just the unarmoured sprites, though. A lot of the armours are chainmail bikinis, leaving huge portions bare.
And it's not just women in the background pictures, it's women wearing next to nothing. The manufacturing one has a woman in an apron and nothing else. That's not the sort of clothing you'd want to be wearing when working with power tools.
As for the mutation explanation, that ain't true. There's clearly male-looking people among the civilians in the mutant pogroms (terror missions). And this is the X-Com universe, where PSI mutations were totally gender-neutral.

[Sonlirain]

Cyberdiscs really are a terror for my early squads. For some reason I was under the impression explosives would make mincemetal out of them, but grenades and even large rockets didn't seem to scratch the thing. In the end I had to sacrifice wave after wave of rookies just firing at the damn things until they finally blew up.

Next time I think I'm going to try having my guy carrying the heavy explosive just run at it, kamikaze style.

By the way, can I set off non-primed explosives with an explosion nearby? E.g, on Jagged Alliance, rather than risk blowing myself up with dynamite, I'd just drop some near a wall and then lob a grenade at it.

You can in Apocalypse. not absolkutely sure about Xcom but i think you can't as instead of causing other explosives to explode it destroys them without causing a secondary explosion.

[EnigmaticHat]

Cyberdiscs really are a terror for my early squads. For some reason I was under the impression explosives would make mincemetal out of them, but grenades and even large rockets didn't seem to scratch the thing. In the end I had to sacrifice wave after wave of rookies just firing at the damn things until they finally blew up.

Next time I think I'm going to try having my guy carrying the heavy explosive just run at it, kamikaze style.

By the way, can I set off non-primed explosives with an explosion nearby? E.g, on Jagged Alliance, rather than risk blowing myself up with dynamite, I'd just drop some near a wall and then lob a grenade at it.

Stun Bombs are what really kills cyberdiscs.

Failing that Heavy Plasma wrecks everything, excepting that one particular enemy that will take quite a few shots.

Failing THAT, laser rifles can and will kill anything... eventually.  Just apply more burst fire to the situation.

Stun batons do surprisingly well, killing the cyberdiscs and not triggering an explosion.  Unfortunately its a hovering death machine so good luck with that.